Imaging software, such as Photoshop® by Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., is a type of software used to view or manipulate digital images. Imaging software is typically presented in a windowed graphical user interface (GUI) environment on a computer system display. Imaging software displays a digital image that can then be manipulated by a user. Some types of manipulations that a user may perform include resizing an image, cropping an image, color correcting an image, and adding text to an image. Image editing software may include various tools that can be used to perform these manipulations. For example, a crop tool can be used to crop an image.
Digital images comprise a number of picture elements (pixels), typically arranged in a rectangular grid. The dimensions of a digital image may be given as the width of the image (in pixels) by the height of the image (in pixels). A digital image can be printed using one of several types of printers. When the digital image is printed, the image may be resized to fit a particular paper size. For example, an image may be printed on a six inch by four inch sheet of paper. If the digital image has a resolution of 900 pixels by 600 pixels, then the resolution of the printed image is 150 dots per inch (dpi). The resolution can be determined by dividing the number of pixels (i.e., dots) in a dimension by the physical size of that dimension (e.g., 900 pixels divided by six inches gives 150 dpi).
A crop tool can be used to select a portion of an image and discard the remainder. A crop tool may include a rectangular selection tool that can be dragged using a mouse or other pointing device. After the original image has been cropped, the resulting image has a reduced pixel count compared to the original image.
A printer typically produces lower quality output when the resolution of the source image is reduced. For a specific printer there may be a resolution below which the printed output is deemed unacceptable to a user of that printer. For example, a user may have determined that any image having a resolution below 150 dpi produces unacceptable printed images. A cropped image may have discarded so much of the original image data that it may result in an unacceptable printed image when the original image had enough image data to produce an acceptable image.
Thus, what is needed is resolution monitoring when using visual manipulation tools without the limitations of conventional techniques.